Advertising is everywhere. It is broadcast over television and radio. It is on the Internet in the form of banners and other ads. It can surely also be used when downloading content via peer-to-peer networks. Advertising works best when it is targeted. Clearly, the ads broadcast during sporting events are targeted to the people that the companies choosing to advertise their products at that time believe will buy their product.
Targeted advertising is more effective in delivering the right commercial information to the right audience than blindly delivering information. However, in achieving effective targeted advertising, certain user information must be collected before an advertisement (ad) can be targeted toward this user. This usually violates the privacy of this user.
During the last decade, more and more content has been delivered over peer-to-peer networks. The content includes document data files, audio (including music, speech), video including movies, slide shows, collections of pictures (still images) multimedia including real-time media etc. One successful example is video distribution using peer-to-peer network, either as a video on demand (VoD) service or as live streaming. Because of the global reach of the Internet and the relatively low cost of data distribution, it is foreseeable that there is a good opportunity for targeted advertising in the peer-to-peer environment.
However, there are some requirements that must be satisfied before targeted commercials (advertising) can be deployed in a global peer-to-peer environment. First, users' privacy must be preserved to comply with laws and regulations of different regions and countries in the world. Second, advertising must be distributed efficiently. Servers should be involved as little as possible to allow scalability and advertising should have the same level of availability as the related content so that lookup complexity remains the same. Third, up-to-date advertising must be flexibly combined with related content. Finally, it must be possible to choose the right advertising for the right audience.
Conventionally, targeted advertising requires that the advertisement server knows some information about the user. One example is inserting advertising in the search results from an online (Internet) search, because the server knows for what the user is looking. But keeping the users' searching history on the advertisement server violates users' privacy. Another approach is to integrate advertisement into the content itself based not on users but on the characteristics of the content. Conventional advertising supported by broadcast TV is one such example. But this approach is not flexible in delivering dynamic, targeted, up-to-date advertisement.
What is needed is flexible, efficient, targeted advertising in a peer-to-peer environment without violating users' privacy.